Lecture/ Seminar One: The Judeo-Christian intellectual heritage (L1)
01.01 The Christian conception of time and space: The eclipse of the classical world
01.02 Morality and human nature: Neo-platonism, stoicism and orphism
01.03 Origins of settled Christian doctrine: Nicea, Constantine, Augustine
01.04 Logic in an age of superstition: Anselm, Aquinas, Occam
01.05 Islam and neo-classicism: Al Ghazali vs Avicenna
01.06 Reformation, protestantism and the printing press: The Gutenberg Galaxy
01.07 Italian humanism and the renaissance (VL : video lecture/discussion)
Lecture/Seminar Two: The classical and early modern theory of the state (L2)
02.01 Socrates, Plato and Aristotle: rights and duties of citizens, rulers and slaves
02.02 Islam, Shi’ism; Caliphate of the golden age, Arab urbanism and theocracy
02.03 Lineage of the Absolutism state (1): Tudor England vs Papal Spain.
02.04 Piracy, propaganda – The Book of Martyrs and uses of the printing press
02.05 Hobbes, Locke and the genesis of the modern nation state: The Leviathan
02.06 Machiavelli and the rejection of virtue: The Prince
Lecture/Seminar Three: Protestant legalism and the clockwork universe (L3)
03.01 Copernicus, Galileo and the re-appraisal of Aristotle’s physics
03.02 Newtonian physics and the new mathematics: God the watchmaker
03.03 Francis Bacon and the pursuit of scientific naturalism
03.04 The scientific method in general. Deism, agnosticism and atheism
03.05 Erasmus: toleration, pluralism and protestant historicism
Lecture/Seminar Four: Early modern European sceptical rationalism (L4)
04.01 Classical origins: Sextus Empiricus’s Arguments against the Mathematicians
04.02 The Satanic Verses: What is to be believed?
04.03 Descartes: Mind-Matter duality and The Cogito
04.04 Leibniz on immaterialism and monads
04.05 Spinoza: the rational reform of ethics; the spirit of honest enquiry
Lecture/Seminar Five: Liberal empiricism: empire, trade and early journalism (L5)
05.01 The English civil war: Early Journalism (1) The Dutch Courants
05.02 Pleasures of the Imagination: Early Journalism (2) Addison and Steele
05.03 The new world and the English imagination: Early Journalism (3) Daniel Defoe
05.04 The Economic impact of early European Empire: Mercantilism; The physiocrats
05.05 The American revolution: Implications of Locke’s empiricist epistemology
05.06 Bourgeois anti-clericalism, exploration and adventure: Voltaire’s Candide
05.07 David Hume: causation, inference and the limits of human understanding
05.08 Adam Smith: the scientific study of human behaviour; the value of economics
05.09 Coffee Houses: early journalism (4) The Economist and The Observer
05.10 The gathering storm: Kant (1) The Critique of Pure Reason
Lecture/Seminar Six: The French revolution and the terror (L6)
06.01 Rousseau (1) The romantic conception of human nature, politics and history (VL)
06.02 Rousseau (2) The general will; social contract and the liberal state (VL)
06.03 The economic crisis of Augustinian France: The bourgeois revolt
06.04 The new world – Anglo-French competition. Slave revolts
06.05 Inciting terror: the press and pamphleteers in revolutionary Paris
06.06 Napoleon, nationalism and empire
06.07 Tom Paine: Common Sense and The Rights of Man
06.08 Edmund Burke and philosophical conservatism from Wellington to Peel |
